“When it’s good to be bad”
“It is a common belief that to achieve a goal one must work at it constantly — not taking a circuitous path towards it when a straight one is available. Thus the Overeaters Anonymous organisation, the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, and so on, ban a variety of ‘bad foods’; financial planners would probably advise clients against going to fancy restaurants while saving up to buy a house or car; a pastor would seek to dissuade his congregation from sin, no matter how minor. In order to achieve a goal, the thinking goes, one must not deviate from the straightest course; to allow for mistakes or failures is to torpedo your chances of attaining your goal.
And yet a new school of thinking is challenging these received ways and arguing that straying from the path, even engaging in hedonistic behaviour, might be the surest way to success…
In experiments conducted with Rik Pieters and Marcel Zeelenberg, and published in January 2016 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, do Vale surveyed the way people go about achieving their goals. She concluded that it is better to make plans to fail intermittently — to splurge on occasional luxuries when saving for a house; to have a slice of chocolate cake when trying to shed a few pounds — than to end up failing anyway and getting so demoralised you give up your goal altogether…
‘Slack’, which allows a person to use more of their cognitive and emotional resources, comes from having a cushier social and financial safety net, according to Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard University, and Eldar Shafir, a behavioural scientist at Princeton University. Slack is often a better indicator of potential success than grit. It’s the reason the impoverished single mother, gritty and hardworking though she might be, is likely to have a tougher time succeeding than a young man from an affluent family.”
I really appreciate the end of this article, which asks us to reflect on why we have the goals we have, and why we make the priorities we do.
Other debunkings of myths about success and perfection:
A Dialogue on Resilience in Palo Alto — December 27, 2015
“The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience’”
